Infinite Loop —

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review

No new features.

In June of 2004, during the WWDC keynote address, Steve Jobs revealed Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger to developers and the public for the first time. When the finished product arrived in April of 2005, Tiger was the biggest, most important, most feature-packed release in the history of Mac OS X by a wide margin. Apple's marketing campaign reflected this, touting "over 150 new features."

All those new features took time. Since its introduction in 2001, there had been at least one major release of Mac OS X each year. Tiger took over a year and a half to arrive. At the time, it definitely seemed worth the wait. Tiger was a hit with users and developers. Apple took the lesson to heart and quickly set expectations for the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard. Through various channels, Apple communicated its intention to move from a 12-month to an 18-month release cycle for Mac OS X. Leopard was officially scheduled for "spring 2007."

Apple even went so far as to list all 300 new features on its website. As it turns out, "spring" was a bit optimistic. Leopard actually shipped at the end of October 2007, nearly two and a half years after Tiger. Did Leopard really have twice as many new features as Tiger? That's debatable. What's certain is that Leopard included a solid crop of new features and technologies, many of which we now take for granted. (For example, have you had a discussion with a potential Mac user since the release of Leopard without mentioning Time Machine? I certainly haven't.)

Mac OS X appeared to be maturing. The progression was clear: longer release cycles, more features. What would Mac OS X 10.6 be like? Would it arrive three and a half years after Leopard? Would it and include 500 new features? A thousand?

At WWDC 2009, Bertrand Serlet announced a move that he described as "unprecedented" in the PC industry.

Mac OS X 10.6 - Read Bertrand's lips: No New Features!

That's right, the next major release of Mac OS X would have no new features. The product name reflected this: "Snow Leopard." Mac OS X 10.6 would merely be a variant of Leopard. Better, faster, more refined, more... uh... snowy.

This was a risky strategy for Apple. After the rapid-fire updates of 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 followed by the riot of new features and APIs in 10.4 and 10.5, could Apple really get away with calling a "time out?" I imagine Bertrand was really sweating this announcement up on the stage at WWDC in front of a live audience of Mac developers. Their reaction? Spontaneous applause. There were even a few hoots and whistles.

Many of these same developers applauded the "150+ new features" in Tiger and the "300 new features" in Leopard at past WWDCs. Now they were applauding zero new features for Snow Leopard? What explains this?

It probably helps to know that the "0 New Features" slide came at the end of an hour-long presentation detailing the major new APIs and technologies in Snow Leopard. It was also quickly followed by a back-pedaling ("well, there is one new feature...") slide describing the addition of Microsoft Exchange support. In isolation, "no new features" may seem to imply stagnation. In context, however, it served as a developer-friendly affirmation.

The overall message from Apple to developers was something like this: "We're adding a ton of new things to Mac OS X that will help you write better applications and make your existing code run faster, and we're going to make sure that all this new stuff is rock-solid and as bug-free as possible. We're not going to overextend ourselves adding a raft of new customer-facing, marketing-friendly features. Instead, we're going to concentrate 100% on the things that affect you, the developers."

But if Snow Leopard is a love letter to developers, is it a Dear John letter to users? You know, those people that the marketing department might so crudely refer to as "customers." What's in it for them? Believe it or not, the sales pitch to users is actually quite similar. As exhausting as it has been for developers to keep up with Apple's seemingly never-ending stream of new APIs, it can be just as taxing for customers to stay on top of Mac OS X's features. Exposé, a new Finder, Spotlight, a new Dock, Time Machine, a new Finder again, a new iLife and iWorkalmost every year, and on and on. And as much as developers hate bugs in Apple's APIs, users who experience those bugs as application crashes have just as much reason to be annoyed.

Enter Snow Leopard: the release where we all get a break from the new-features/new-bugs treadmill of Mac OS X development. That's the pitch.

Uncomfortable realities

But wait a second, didn't I just mention an "hour-long presentation" about Snow Leopard featuring "major new APIs and technologies?" When speaking to developers, Apple's message of "no new features" is another way of saying "no new bugs." Snow Leopard is supposed to fix old bugs without introducing new ones. But nothing says "new bugs, coming right up" quite like major new APIs. So which is it?

Similarly, for users, "no new features" connotes stability and reliability. But if Snow Leopard includes enough changes to the core OS to fill an hour-long overview session at WWDC more than a year before its release, can Apple really make good on this promise? Or will users end up with all the disadvantages of a feature-packed release like Tiger or Leopard—the inevitable 10.x.0 bugs, the unfamiliar, untried new functionality—but without any of the actual new features?

Yes, it's enough to make one quite cynical about Apple's real motivations. To throw some more fuel on the fire, have a look at the Mac OS X release timeline below. Next to each release, I've included a list of its most significant features.

Mac OS X release timeline

That curve is taking on a decidedly droopy shape, as if it's being weighed down by the ever-increasing number of new features. (The releases are distributed uniformly on the Y axis.) Maybe you think it's reasonable for the time between releases to stretch out as each one brings a heavier load of goodies than the last, but keep in mind the logical consequence of such a curve over the longhorn haul.

And yeah, there's a little upwards kick at the end for 10.6, but remember, this is supposed to be the "no new features" release. Version 10.1 had a similar no-frills focus but took a heck of a lot less time to arrive.

Looking at this graph, it's hard not to wonder if there's something siphoning resources from the Mac OS X development effort. Maybe, say, some project that's in the first two or three major releases of its life, still in that steep, early section of its own timeline graph. Yes, I'm talking about the iPhone, specifically iPhone OS. The iPhone business has exploded onto Apple's balance sheets like no other product before, even the iPod. It's also accruing developers at an alarming rate.

It's not a stretch to imagine that many of the artists and developers who piled on the user-visible features in Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 have been reassigned to iPhone OS (temporarily or otherwise). After all, Mac OS X and iPhone OS share the same core operating system, the same language for GUI development, and many of the same APIs. Some workforce migration seems inevitable.

And let's not forget the "Mac OS X" technologies that we later learned were developed for the iPhone and just happened to be announced for the Mac first (because the iPhone was still a secret), like Core Animation and code signing. Such conspiracy theories certainly aren't helped by WWDC keynote snubs and other indignities suffered by Mac OS X and the Mac in general since the iPhone arrived on the scene. And so, on top of everything else, Snow Leopard is tasked with restoring some luster to Mac OS X.

Got all that? A nearly two-year development cycle, but no new features. Major new frameworks for developers, but few new bugs. Significant changes to the core OS, but more reliability. And a franchise rejuvenation with few user-visible changes.

John Siracusa
John Siracusa has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Boston University. He has been a Mac user since 1984, a Unix geek since 1993, and is a professional web developer and freelance technology writer. Emailsiracusa@arstechnica.com//Twitter@siracusa

Seriously... that's one feature of the old site that really needs to come back for long articles like this one. I love lots of content (that's why I come to Ars), but I also like being able to find the stuff I read again later.

Originally posted by Gulielmus: I realize it's increments of OS X version numbers, but I had to look at it for a while to figure out why it was moving upwards.

The second dimension is there so the time between major releases can be visualized as a curve, rather than linearly. (It's harder to judge small differences in length than it is to see small differences in angle.)

I heard about 10.6 just before I sold my Mac. I actually considered holding off for the release in the hopes that I would be happy with it. However after 10.5 then 10.6 I always found myself struggling with OS X in some form or another. Be it Finder, or the UI that for some reason or another I always had problems at least once per month. (Like shutting down the sys and instead of turning off it exited the GUI and just sat there at the command line.)Snow Leopard's announcement being no new feature and we are doing "optimization" under the hood stood for one and only one thing in my mind: we are cleaning up the mess we left under the hood from 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.4intel and 10.5. Something IMHO they should have been doing all along; and screamed at me that until this point Apple was more interested in features then keeping their system as bug free as possible.10.6 may very well be one heck of a nicely cleaned up OS under the hood, however it it too late for me my son....I've gone back to the Microsoft side and frankly I've been damn happy with Win7. This isn't so much a knock at Apple. Just that there are some of us who are annoyed enough at them that they should have considered this years ago.

PS- Seeing the release date of Leopard I also anticipated some pretty buggy code as well since it appears that Apple is trying to release before Win7 is out, and as such seems rushed. I'm watching the boards to see the complains and see if this really is a valid observation or just an assumption. *shrugs* In the end I don't really care either way since I'm not running 10.x anymore. I would consider Apple again if they ever did public RC's like MS. Where you can catch a ton more bugs with the help of your enthusiast userbase. The telemetry in Windows gave MS a wealth of info to debug. There is nothing keeping Apple from doing the same other then at least a perceived vanity about their software. The actress doesn't want to wander among the little people without her make-up on, or so it would seem.

Originally posted by Gulielmus: I realize it's increments of OS X version numbers, but I had to look at it for a while to figure out why it was moving upwards.

The second dimension is there so the time between major releases can be visualized as a curve, rather than linearly. (It's harder to judge small differences in length than it is to see small differences in angle.)

Um, you could at least mark the axis "os version" then. I couldn't tell each 0.1 increment was evenly spaced at first so it looked like a serious empty axis faux pas.

Anyway, just starting to get into the rest of this *massive* article. Whew.

On page 8, it states that there are 'high-end models sporting two chips with eight cores each' with a link to Mac Pro. The Mac Pro has eight cores, but that is with: Two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors.

At the moment, it appears that the most cores on an Intel or AMD processor is six.

One of my favorite features is the return of the checkboxes to turn off multi-finger gesture support system wide. The pinch and rotate commands drove me crazy in most applications. The system preference pane in Leopard clearly had room for checkboxes to turn off those gestures, but no actual checkboxes. Snow Leopard allows all the gestures to be turned on and off.

I really appreciate them paring down the printer drivers to a set of more common drivers, and then loading others on demand. It just never made sense to me to carry around several gigabytes of drivers for printers that I would likely never see in my lifetime, let alone need to print to.

After I installed I got repeated warnings that NotificationExec required Rosetta. This resulted in countless instances of a Software Update application offering to install Rosetta, slowly filling up the dock. I finally relented and installed Rosetta. Not a very auspicious start. Apparently NotificationExec is part of some Maxtor software, but the behavior of Software Update seems buggy in any case. One offer to install Rosetta would be sufficient.

I don't like the appearance of the new dock menus. Apple seems to change the behavior of the Dock for no good reason every release. I find it confusing that the context menu on dock icons is now different from the menu I see when holding down on an icon. Actually, it's different depending on whether the app is running or not when you hold on an icon. Compare ctrl-click on System Preferences with click and hold. Bizarre.

But, I do like being able to minimize windows into the icon, essentially just making them disappear, and I do like holding down on an icon to launch Expose. I just don't see why the menu needs to be different when I do that and why they need to look different at all.

Time Machine sadly doesn't seem to have any interface improvements. And, there are no new preferences for selecting backup frequency. Over Airport, hourly backups are annoying. The overly cute interface becomes cloying when it runs slowly. The star field is cute for a second, but not as you watch it drifting by while the rainbow cursor spins. I understand the metaphors they are trying to use, but I feel like the whole thing could run faster and with better feedback if it wasn't so over the top.

Originally posted by mathrockbrock:Um, you could at least mark the axis "os version" then. I couldn't tell each 0.1 increment was evenly spaced at first so it looked like a serious empty axis faux pas.

That's why this sentence appear below the graph, right after the mention of curve shape: "The releases are distributed uniformly on the Y axis." (Labeling the axis as "OS version" doesn't express the important part, which is the fact that they're all equally spaced.)

Originally posted by steveg56:On page 8, it states that there are 'high-end models sporting two chips with eight cores each' with a link to Mac Pro. The Mac Pro has eight cores, but that is with: Two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors.

You mentioned QuickTime Pro being unlocked within QuickTime 7 Player - having installed Snow Leopard and not having unlocked it before installing, unless I'm missing something QuickTime Pro was not provided for free.